Noted in Stories

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  Palm Trees and Alpine Peaks

  The Tyrolean spa town of Meran, part of Italy since the post-WWI carve-up of the fallen Austro-Hungarian empire, was, a century ago, the hot destination of its day, a leafy Hapsburg Shangri-La teeming with poets, royalty, adulterers, gamblers and the convalescing. Visitors came for the opera, the mild climate, to take the waters and stroll its rambling walks, and included a young Sigmund Freud, an ailing Franz Kafka and Sissi, the beautiful, eccentric Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Traditional Mittel-European hospitality still flourishes here today, as does the city’s modern mineral spa and a wider culture of ...read more

  Italy Stories On May 1, 2015
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  Blue Medina

  Traditional Arabic architecture doesn’t give a lot away from its exterior, with often vast, exquisitely decorated spaces secreted behind heavy doors, shutters and blank whitewashed streetscapes. But stay at La Chambre Bleue, a B&B in a vibrant, if totally untouristed, enclave of Tunis’ ancient Medina, and such a space is yours to temporarily call your own. We talk to Maroune ben Miled, who, with Sondos Belhassen, welcomes guests into a stunningly chic, beautifully bohemian family home, giving guests not just a stylish place to stay, but a chance to discover the moods and rhythms of Tunisian ...read more

  Stories Tunisia On March 1, 2015
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  High Desert Art of Living

  The night sky above Cortijada Los Gázquez is an astonishing sight, a glowing canopy of stars all but filling its inky dome. Up in the high desert of the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez there is almost no light pollution – it is, as they say in the guidebooks, off the beaten track. This is Andalucía at its most traditionally rural, and often wild, where rocky, arid mountains rise up from the plains south of Murcia before tumbling down to the coast of the Cabo de Gata. ...read more

  Spain Stories On February 1, 2015
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  Le Bouche à Oreille

  Hotel du Temps has a depth, texture and warmth born out of genuine creative curiosity and fluid, fertile collaboration. And it’s a place that really does feel like home. Winsome, wistful, low-fi rooms have a look that is beguilingly indeterminate; a little bucolic, a touch Scandinavian, but also utterly, totally Paris right now. We talk to first time hotelier, Yoan Marciano about how Hotel du Temps came to be. ...read more

  France Stories On December 30, 2014